Yale Phil­har­mo­nia played Messiaen’s Turan­galîla-Symphonie here in New Haven last night. They’re repeat­ing it tomorrow night at Carnegie. If you’re in NYC and have the evening free I urge you to go hear it. I know everyone’s probably Messiaen’ed out by now (and it’s not often one can say that) but to hear this piece live is really a special occasion. Even though the piece is really long— about 80 minutes— the concert feels short, thanks to Reinbert de Leeuw’s brisk, almost neoclas­si­cal reading; it reminds me of the way Boulez does Mahler— he doesn’t stop to look to the heavens (or look at himself in the mirror).

I’d been obsessed with Turan­galîla when I was about 16— probably the appro­pri­ate time to be obsessed with that kind of piece— but hadn’t listen to it much recently. Coming to it with fresh ears, I was surprised just how gamelan-y the music is. Besides the seven or eight percus­sion­ists, there’s a central battery of celesta, keyboard glock­en­spiel (!), and solo piano, all of which seem to play almost constantly. (The sound of that little key-glock cuts through anything. I wonder if the player had any idea just how promi­nent her instru­ment was, even from Woolsey’s super-balcony). The sum effect was that kind of massed, jangly sound one hears with Balinese gamelan, smashed together with a loopy Wagner­ian orches­tra (someone tell Evan Ziporyn).

So appar­ently at CalTech, they have over 130 olive trees around campus and press their own olive oil. I could not possibly be any more jealous. Things like this make me feel even more dismal facing the long New Haven winter.

I spent last week at my family’s ances­tral home in Wash­ing­ton, CT. I don’t remember what I did, exactly, but I think it involved many days of alter­nately cooking and eating.

I also got to play the piano badly and for fun, which is not some­thing I usually have the time or energy to do in New Haven, perhaps because I don’t have a piano in my apartment’s living room. I took out all my volumes of Schubert sonatas and even pounded through the Hammerklavier. It was epic.

My brother Wells’s violin playing has blos­somed to the point where he can sight-read Brahms and Beethoven with aplomb. We were reading through Brahms’s third sonata, and I had a shocking real­iza­tion in the first movement devel­op­ment: it has a constant dominant pedal. I can’t think of any other examples of this in the clas­si­cal liter­a­ture. Can I even still call it a “devel­op­ment”? It’s really just an extended dominant pedal leading into the recap. Here, listen:

I guess what aston­ished me was not the presence of the pedal, but how it threat­ens and ulti­mately subverts the feeling of sonata form in the movement. There is none of the bluster and bombast that Brahms usually brings into his devel­op­ments; all the tension is roiling just beneath the remark­ably calm surface. Instead, all of the outward drama gets post­poned until the recap’s tran­si­tion into the second theme, which swings wildly and at top volume between harmonic regions. In the normal trajec­tory of a sonata, one has a sense of “release” or “return” at this point; here, that sense has been completely under­mined by the relative stasis of the devel­op­ment.

Just wanted to briefly plug a cool show I’m excited to be a part of, coming up this Saturday. My friend Doug Fisk has brought together a group of nine composer/pianists, each of whom will perform one of their own pieces. This show is at Fire­house 12 in New Haven, and we’re gearing up for another one at Miller Theater Merkin Hall in NYC this spring. More info over at the calendar page (along with some new events).

Here’s the poster I designed for the event, which reveals my contin­u­ing obses­sion with the work of Josef Müller-Brock­mann (click for larger):

Instead of your tradi­tional puff piece on voters’ states of mind today, NYTimes.com has a puff multi­me­dia widget. I like this trend. (I also like Helvetica.)

For the record, I am feeling both excited and distracted. Connecti­cut isn’t exactly the most thrilling place to be today, and I voted absentee weeks ago in my hometown. But for some reason it still feels like a holiday. I have a new piece called Some Connecti­cut Gospel, which I wrote over the last couple of months. It’s partly about Ives, and how his music and inim­itable person­al­ity have become a legend for composers, and also about these strange feelings (hope? patri­o­tism?) that have been welling up inside me recently (see my Oct. 10 post).

This is not some­thing I’m partic­u­larly used to. Connecti­cut is unlike some other states, whose resi­dents seem to have a strong sense of group identity and even pride. I never feel “Connecti­cut­ian”; I tend to think of myself as a misplaced Cali­forn­ian, even though I only spent the first five years of my life in the Bay Area. Why is that? Did Connecti­cut used to have more of a person­al­ity? Before the facto­ries shut down, before every city became a depressed corpse, before Route 7 became a parade of strip-malls and the south­west corner a spec-house paradise, the state must have had some real charm. Some Connecti­cut Gospel is a song of praise to this imagined place— Ives’s Connecti­cut. It will be premièred in Miami (of all places) on January 30th by members of the New World Symphony, and likely reprised up here in New Haven in February.

We went deep-sea fishing yester­day and hung out with some Repub­li­cans! Actually, I’m only kidding. We didn’t talk to them, but we did gawk a lot and talk about them. I was initially kind of shocked to see someone wearing this hat— non-iron­i­cally (not an early Halloween costume or anything!). But it made me think about how in a certain way my circle is very narrow, much more even than when I was an under­grad (the School of Music is, predictably, much less diverse). It made me wonder that I wasn’t seeing the world wrong from some deluded, far-left point of view. When I listen to or read the news, I like to think I know how to spot bias, and that as a result I “know the facts” about all the “issues”. But truth­fully, I haven’t even given the other side a chance.

My gut reaction is to scorn conser­v­a­tives I’ve met who are really just like me— who’ve inher­ited their ideas from their parents and have never had to deeply question their own world­view. It’s a terrible double standard, and I’m sure I hold conser­v­a­tives to many more. Should I be doing more ques­tion­ing of my polit­i­cal beliefs, simply because I hold the same views as my parents (and their parents)?

I caught four good-sized bluefish (the first four fish I’ve caught in my life!). The Repub­li­cans looked like they caught about 27 each, but really, isn’t sport-fishing exper­tise prac­ti­cally a require­ment for joining the party?